Ontological security and residential experiences in China: The ‘old’ and the ‘new’ in Shanghai’s Luwan district

Elaborating upon the old/new neighbourhood distinction and in-between spaces

If the metaphor of text is applied to the city, ²⁶ then within this part of Luwan district there are a diverse range of sentences and grammatical structures, each of which exists layer upon layer, providing insights into the semantics of specific historical discourses; all of which are located within the physical space of the present. Some facets of the urban text – such as the low-rise housing developments known as xincun (新村) – bear the mark of Maoist socialism. Meanwhile, up the road are reflections of architectural styles and ornamentation of France and, only a short bus journey away toward the east, is the hyper-European iconic façade of the Bund. Many more spaces speak of the rapid commercialization and globalization that has occurred across the PRC since Deng Xiaoping’s policies of reform and opening up to the outside world from the late 1970s. There are, for example, new commercial housing complexes ²⁷ and xiaoqu that often adopt the form of high-rise gated complexes with security personnel and surveillance cameras. Such juxtapositions of built forms visually indicate the fluidity of change, highlighting the obvious, yet sometimes elided, fact that the old and new comprise a spectrum rather than being simply polar extremes.

When faced with the shades of such an urban texturology, it felt natural to approach this by examining expressions falling at each end of the spectrum and, then, placing them side by side, form a mental list of ways in which they are antithetical to each other. At least that is what I found myself doing, semi-consciously embarking upon a well-travelled ethnographic road that I have already travelled. ²⁸ Even a casual wander through this area of Luwan district can leave a striking impression of just how many different forms of material space there are, even within a space of only several blocks, each of which seems to contain different forms of social and cultural life. In one 1980s-built xincun, though constructed in the 1980s but already identifiable as an older residential space such is the speed at which reconstructions have continued since then, there is a geometric grid of pedestrian alleyways with numbered blocks. Within the narrow lanes is much activity and sound, from the sporadic clanking of majiang tiles to dogs barking. Meanwhile several minutes on foot to the north, less than two blocks away, is a newly built commercial housing complex. Uniformed security guards guard the main entrance from the street, and there is an iron gate, behind which there is a movable barrier that can be lifted when those residents with cars come in and out of the complex. Upon entry into the complex, there is a paved pathway with various forms of vegetation neatly planted on each side. High-rise buildings, together with two lower-rise blocks, rise up at each corner of a communal area where there is a fountain and several raised flowerbeds. The atmosphere is serene and calm, and residents walking past whilst talking on mobile phones or children playing at the fountain only intermittently punctuate this atmosphere.

Such a way of approaching the local area can make it conform to previously established sociological definitions. In one sense, the co-existence of many rundown buildings with more high-end residential compounds and, just down the road, large international hotels, makes the area as a whole echo descriptions of what has been defined within sociological literature as a ‘zone of transition’ and, within common speech, as the ‘inner city’. ²⁹ In another sense, the sharp divisions between spaces suggest that it conforms to Park’s model of a city as a mosaic of different worlds. ³⁰

Such different architectural structures, seen in conjunction with the types of activity taking place, the general age of residents, their clothing, the languages being spoken and the topics of conversation, make it tempting to embark upon a prolonged discussion contrasting the types of communal life within these spaces. And this is a valuable pursuit that can be divided into an extensive list of themes, such as the nature of neighbourliness, the degree of belonging, and distinctions between private and public space. Yet whilst these spaces can be contrasted in numerous ways, such a way of seeing can reify differences, suggesting that forms of sociability are the inevitable result of the nature of certain spaces masking, even within one space, differing, often contrasting, forms of sociability, comprising what Cohen, referring to Dumont, calls a ‘complementary opposition’. ³¹ Furthermore, contrasting pictures of a low-rise and high-rise neighbourhood can inadvertently accentuate a vivid image of the anonymity of modern life in which locality has been undermined by the unrelenting impact of modernity which, in turn, has the undesired effect of idealizing older forms of community, and thereby reinforcing the dominant narrative of community’s supposed decline or disappearance ³² and propagating a misleading, Manichean and unhelpful oppositional trope of ‘old’ and ‘new’ in which the concepts of ‘community’ and ‘modernity’ are unable to exist side by side. ³³

And it not only becomes clear that as there are differences between these spaces, so there are similarities, but also that within each there are a whole array of practices that appear to fail to fit into any overarching classificatory framework. And the more I sought to reconcile the realities of life within these residential contexts through utilization of the discursive constructions of the ‘new’ and ‘old’, the more something or someone punctured the narrative that I was seeking to construct through my data. Put another way, the more it became clear that the realities within different types of residential space could not be categorized in terms of a simple old/new distinction. The old is in the new and vice versa, evoking in some way Trinh Minh-ha’s identification of a Third World being ‘in the First World, and vice versa’ ³⁴ and many of the conceptual attempts in the 1990s to break away from viewing globalization in terms of simplistic binaries. ³⁵ Such an effort is needed here, since the old and the new are mutually entwined, and the more one attempts to unwrap them, the more they open up, like a Russian doll, to reveal yet another layer, right down until you get to the individual split, conflicted and ambivalent subjectivities of those residents who live within these locations, as will be explored at greater length later in this article.

In short, two aspects of society that are sometimes presented as a dichotomy seemed in fact to be complementary, coexisting within many types of material surface. The tendency to view the old and new as vehicles through which distinctions can be made is in a sense a replay of those Chicago School scholars who used Durkheim’s dichotomy of mechanical and organic society as a paradigm for their own distinctions between urban and rural society. ³⁶ Whilst these two aspects of a society were clearly visible in all of the residential spaces in the area that I was able to observe, from a low-rise nongtang and the 1980s xincun right through to the recently built high-rise commercial housing complexes, the most vivid co-existence of these two modes of being was in the 1980s xincun lived in by Li Mei and her husband, a couple in their early 60s who participated in this research project. This space contained those elements of communion that are often, mistakenly, held as being the particular properties and states of a certain time and space, rather than being seen as co-existing elements, or the aforementioned two sides of the same coin. Just as there were complex forces compelling cohesion, organization and unity so there were those pushing toward conflict, opposition and fragmentation.

Upon entering the lane, the sounds from the street outside fade away, the high-rise buildings disappear and it feels as if there is a timeless quality to life, albeit one that is interrupted intermittently by cars and bicycles passing through the narrow lanes. Vendors and their stalls selling such things as fruit, vegetables and soft drinks or providing services such as haircuts and bicycle repairs punctuate the major artery linking Mengzi and Jumen roads. The space feels like a capsule inside which there are remnants of a type of ‘work unit’ living collective. It also appears to conform to the classic image of Gemeinschaft as described by Forrest and Yip: ‘the classic imagery of the more settled, inner city community. Residents appear to know most or many of their neighbours, there is a high level of mutual trust, many have kin living nearby and it is regarded as a friendly place’. ³⁷ Seen in this way, Li Mei’s residential context appears ‘small, parochial, stable, and ‘face-to-face’: people interacted with each other as ‘total’ social persons informed by a comprehensive personal knowledge of each other, their relationships often underpinned by ties of affinity and consanguinity’, it is ‘a traditional and conservative way of life’. ³⁸ Even more prosaically, perhaps, the area appears as an oasis in ‘the stormy sea of the Gesellschaft metropolis’ that provides ‘a sense of community identity where similar confessions, ethnes, and status groups can find mutual recognition and acceptance’. ³⁹ Even the residents here seem to perform in ways that accentuates such a picture. They gather chatting and peeling each other’s vegetables – a rural activity – and travel for weekend breaks to rural locations. They sit during the early evenings in an area covered by plastic tarpaulin at which there are both armchairs and tables, wearing what to many Western observers appear as pyjamas, talking, playing chess, playing cards or simply hanging out, and everyone seems to know each other. Echoing Walter Benjamin’s observation elsewhere, the boundaries here are so imprecise that it seems that ‘the inside is on the outside’ ⁴⁰ .

Although it is easy to get lost in contemplation of such scenes, there are aspects of life that bear more in common with both descriptions of newer urban Chinese neighbourhoods and models of Gesellschaft. Residents experience fears, fluidity and violence. Some of these more divisive and fragmentary moods come to the surface when newcomers enter the area. In one instance, a young couple rented an apartment on the lane. Soon after, they began to receive complaints from a neighbour who claimed that they were too loud. The young couple, believing they were quiet and respectful of their neighbours, were bemused at this reaction yet nonetheless sought to appease the neighbour by, for example, purchasing carpet and slippers to soften the noise of their feet on the wooden floor. Feeling that the matter might end here, the couple was soon surprised to find that the complaints not only continued but escalated, becoming, so they said, increasingly aggressive and unreasonable. Finally they saw no way to resolve the issue other than to move out. The landlord of this property, annoyed at the way his tenants had been, as he saw it, pushed out, thus causing him to lose valuable rental income, responded by deliberately renting out the apartment to five men from the countryside whom he thought, by virtue of their employment in a local restaurant, would be loud, thus making a point to the woman who complained.

In a public housing block just down the road there was a similar incident, again involving a long-term resident and incoming tenant. In this conflict, the fear, fragility and lack of norms that governed neighbourly relations became clear, exposing undercurrents of tension and violence. Neighbours, all of whom were witnesses to a protracted and escalating conflict that began with complaints before morphing into shouting and then physical violence, seemed wary of being drawn into the affair. Though many voiced their feelings that the long-term resident was in the wrong here, calling her an array of insults behind her back, none seemed prepared to openly express this, let alone actively enter the matter. When the residents committee (juweihui 居委会) were invited into the conflict, ostensibly to act as mediators, it indicated that when breakdowns in primary associations produce de-regulation and violence, official organs step in to compensate. Yet the various employees of the residents committee could do nothing, appearing as curious bystanders, being either unable or unwilling to meaningfully engage. Even the local police offered no solution when they too were invited into the affair, cursorily sympathizing with one of the parties involved, yet ostensibly hoping the matter would go away. In fact, reading between the lines and gleaning information accrued from different sources, it seemed as if various representatives of the residents committee were required to engage in a degree of ‘double dealing’ (两面派) and by virtue of this they were able to impact upon the outcome of the conflict. By implicitly telling each of the parties involved that the issue was the fault of the other, they simultaneously exacerbated and ameliorated the conflict. On the one hand, this provided a basis on which participants in this conflict could, seemingly with justification, dig deeper, stick to their guns, thus further entrenching their own position vis-a-vis the other. Yet, on the other hand, by making participants aware of such an opinion, they were, in effect, informing each person that in the eyes of spectators they were the injured party and this paved the way for each to step down in a way that would not require them to admit wrong-doing, thereby avoiding losing face, and enabling them to curtail conflict with what might be termed a degree of ‘moral high-ground’. In any event, and despite a brief hiatus, the matter did not disappear. Ultimately, several members of the tenant’s extended family, all of whom lived in the vicinity, accompanied by several friends with whom they played majiang, came over to the public housing block in the early evening, confronting the longer-term resident, accusing her of bullying their relative. The scene became increasingly heated, doors were kicked and there was much shouting. Several weeks later, their relative moved out, feeling that the matter could not be resolved in any other way, though her relatives later accused her of being cowardly in not trying to continue to find a more personally advantageous resolution. Unbeknown to her, nails were glued into the lock of the longer-term resident’s front door, presumably meaning that she would not, without assistance, have been able to enter her home.

The concept of ‘natural area’ provides one lens through which these conflicts between established residents and newcomers might be understood. As Robert Park observes, ‘natural areas’ are prone to the forces of ecological succession, namely ‘the invasion of the territory of a “weaker” species by a “stronger” rival’ and that ‘the moral order of the self-contained urban community, especially on the fringes of expanding business districts, is constantly under threat’. ⁴¹ Put another way, change in the local population is a mechanism by which natural areas may transform. From this perspective, the invasion of a natural area by socially or racially different individuals is met with resistance, competition for housing turns into conflict, as locals and newcomers try to devise strategies to outdo each other. If no accommodation between the two groups is reached, one of the groups will retreat. If the newcomer withdraws, the invasion has been halted, whereas if the established population withdraws, their departure, in conjunction with the continued arrival of the new groups, will result in succession, both of population and social institutions. ⁴²

Such a way of thinking requires that these tensions between established locals and newcomers be seen in the wider context of the gentrification that has been occurring in the surrounding area and which has, in the past several years, filtered increasingly into older residential contexts. Property prices have increased, a rental market has developed as homeowners seek to capitalize on this, being helped in turn by an increasing number of white-collar workers who wish to live within close proximity to their places of work. Although this partially explains what is happening, when local established residents and newcomers engage in forms of conflict with each other this is rather more to do with the tensions between established residents than it is to do with the newcomers. Much of the anger, though projected onto newcomers, seems fundamentally to be directed at those other established residents who had moved away, both geographically and socially, yet in retaining their properties and letting them out as a means of generating income they remained simultaneously inside and outside the old area, introducing yet another facet of the ‘in-between-ness’ that permeates this article. The conflict is between people of a previously held to be homogeneous group who have now been shown as being different – or wish to present themselves as being so – by virtue of their relative ability to capitalize upon opportunities in the changing Chinese economy. For Chen, a middle-aged woman who had rented out her two-bedroom apartment in a 1980s-built xincun, the motivation to move was only partially connected to the additional rental income this provided, and rather more to do with the fact that it provided her and, significantly, her daughter with an opportunity to escape what she, as well as many others in the city, saw as an area which, and inhabitants who, had low ‘personal quality’, despite the recent processes of gentrification that the area has been subject to. Such continued salience of a cultural language of shangzhijiao and xiazhijiao despite gentrification shows just how embedded this classificatory framework is.

Though the pace seems slow in Li Mei’s xincun, especially in contrast to the speed of cars and movement on the streets that circumvent this lane, change is happening in profound ways. Whilst forces of nature, shared age, home location (many residents originally came from either Anhui or Shandong provinces), shared backgrounds (residents’ lives have woven together at many junctures, such as through shared school and work experiences) and a low degree of residential mobility, albeit with state involvement, conspired to ‘bring about an orderly and typical grouping’, ⁴³ biological and social forces now threaten to disturb the hitherto workings of the community. The community now flourishes because a great number of residents have recently retired having worked for state-run organizations. They have sufficient time, energy (having retired early, they are far from infirm) and disposable incomes, often through modest state pensions, that allow them to invest in shared activities. And here lies the problem. The residents, many of whom are now in their late 50s and early 60s, will soon be much more frail and a lack of infrastructure in these xincun such as elevators means that it is unlikely that they could remain here into their very old age, without the care of their younger relatives. Significantly, it does not seem to be the case that residents’ sons and daughters would be prepared to come to live with them even though, to varying extents, they benefit from the care that their own parents provide for their sons and daughters now. Residents such as Li Mei and her husband are already under pressure to move so as to be able to live either with or closer to their daughter, though admittedly the issue is slightly complicated by the fact that within the area in which Li Mei and her husband live there is a high-quality kindergarten. This is illustrative of changing dynamics within the Chinese family, particularly generational attitudes toward filial piety as well as shifting generational attitudes toward different types of residential context. Younger relatives do not share the almost universally positive feelings about the xincun of their parents, and what seems to Li Mei and her husband as intimate and comfortable appears to their daughter as claustrophobic and uncomfortable. They would, in short, be much happier living in a new, perhaps suburban, apartment complex than they would here in this xincun. Whilst the suburbs inspire fearful sentiments for some – as will be discussed later – for younger people they often possess a vastly more positive set of connotations. Li Jian’s daughter, for example, willingly moved to the suburban area of Xinzhuang subsequent to her marriage in the early summer of 2011, to live with her husband in an apartment owned by her father. Though she moved back to Luwan when she became pregnant, this was in order to receive care from her parents and did not represent, in any way, a rejection of suburban life and a desire to return to life in the inner city. For Li Jian’s daughter, the suburbs represented both emotional and physical space, cleanliness and status, all of which contributed to a type of lifestyle to which she aspired. Meanwhile, she possessed the necessary skills, such as the ability to drive a car and use communication technologies, as well as the financial capacity to buy these products, enabling her to engage in those spatially extended relationships that have, in other research projects, become a defining feature of contemporary urban life, meaning in turn that she has less need to build intimacy with those living in the same residential space.

Focusing upon biological aging and generational attitudes highlights how neighbourhoods have ‘careers’ or, put another way, are not only subject to periods of transition but also growth and decline. ⁴⁴ This rather more fluid way of seeing neighbourhoods is, perhaps, a fitting way to end this part of the article. Such a way of seeing residential areas might partially explain why those very same xincun that Deborah Pellow, writing in the 1980s, saw as cold and emotionally distant ⁴⁵ now appear to me as warm and emotionally close, albeit with contradictions. Or, how those lanes that once appeared as poetic and creative ⁴⁶ appear now to a resident such as Li Lin and her husband as dirty, rundown spaces with the majority of residents having long since moved out, renting their apartments to migrant workers whilst they wait to see how much compensation they will be given once the government implements the inevitable demolition of the area in which they live. My point is that if different residential spaces are to be compared and contrasted, it must be acknowledged explicitly that they are subject to processes of transformation. Furthermore, it must be acknowledged that there are tensions existing within various forms of residential space and that simple forms of classification are blunt conceptual instruments with which to make sense of the urban residential environment.

Striving for ontological security

The paragraphs below highlight the interconnected nature of different types of residential space within this area of Luwan, focusing on how residents move between them, both physically and imaginatively, and how such processes impact upon their identifications with different types of residential space. By reflexively monitoring the image they had of their environment, social relations and habitat, informants appeared to gain (or lose) – sometimes almost simultaneously – ‘ontological security’.

As a consequence of the impact of Louis Wirth’s suggestion that people cope with the fragmentation in their lives brought about by the loss of community by adopting attitudes of reserve and indifference, ‘as devices for immunizing themselves against the personal claims and expectations of others’, ⁴⁷ the image of the ‘individual threading an idiosyncratic route through a variety of disconnected social milieux, each claiming a different aspect of the self’ ⁴⁸ and functioning ‘only with reference to a single segment of his personality’ ⁴⁹ has become a recurring and powerful feature in both academic scholarship and popular imaginations. Although the people whom I encountered in Luwan seemed motivated by a desire to reconcile split images and subjectivities, reduce anxiety and, by virtue of this, attain a degree of ontological security in the world – all of which were, to varying extents, made necessary by virtue of their exposure to changed circumstances, they seemed to bear very little resemblance to the aforementioned isolated and lonely individual. Consider, for example, Li Jian who has recently become a grandfather. During the early evenings, after dinner, Li Jian can often be seen strolling down the road from his low-rise gated xiaoqu before heading into an old neighbourhood where his now very elderly and infirm parents live with his younger sister, her husband and their son, now in his early 20s. Typically he stops briefly here before calling into the home of another of his sisters, in the contiguous xincun. He invariably seems to stay here longer than he intended, largely because typically his sister and her husband have guests, many of whom he knows himself, and he is quickly a recipient of invitations to sit for a while and partake in a second dinner, drink a beer or simply chat. Usually, Li Jian will leave, often seemingly suddenly, to go to another place within this old neighbourhood, a majiang room, and it is here that he spends most of his evening.

Li Jian has put himself in a position that enables him to partake in life in both the new and old neighbourhood. For Li Jian, the older low-rise neighbourhood still lived in by his parents constituted a focal point in his life, almost representing an extension to his home – an additional living room – such was the ease with which he could come and go between the two locations. This fluidity between two types of residential living seemed to impact upon the ways he related to, and identified with, not only the older nongtang of his parents but also the xiaoqu in which he lived. With regard to the older nongtang, he appreciated not having to deal with the practical shortcomings associated with the life there, such as lack of space and privacy; something that he appreciated even more once he returned to his vastly more spacious and self-contained xiaoqu. Engaging with neighbours and neighbourhoods in this way seemed to act as a catalyst through which positive identifications with not only older nongtang and xincun but also his own current neighbourhood could emerge. By virtue of looking from a distance, both emotional and geographical, identifications became separated from the day-to-day realities of life within those older neighbourhoods, such as poor amenities, dirt, rubbish on streets and so on and, in the process, became much more positive. Whilst Li Jian, echoing those discussed by Zhang Li, no longer sought happiness and fulfilment through collective sacrifice and socialist ideals, ⁵⁰ hoping to find material comfort and social distinction in his gated community, his quest for the good life relied, to some extent, on his being able to return to the physical and social landscape of his past.

As Li Jian threads his route through what might initially appear disconnected social milieu, he brings them together and as he does so various strands from his own past and present, as well as that of the city in which he lives, intermingle. As a consequence of this, Li Jian is able to attain something more wholesome than the fragmented, disjointed and split subjectivities that social life in the city is often said to determine. By virtue of one short stroll, Li Jian can experience himself as a father, father-in-law, grandfather, husband, son, sibling, uncle, brother-in-law, neighbour and friend. In this case, the plurality of roles does not lead to fragmentation or fractionalization, but Li Jian seems to reconcile the multiplicity of roles that are played, and each informs the other and these various aspects of behaviour are constituents of a greater whole, rather than mere discrete compartments. ⁵¹

For various residents – with varying degrees of success – ontological security was impacted upon by their relative capacities to live between the old and the new. Li Yu’s process of monitoring her environment seemed to leave her feeling rather less secure than Li Jian whose satisfaction about his life in the area was so great that he almost appeared annoyed to have to explain what was to him so taken for granted. Though Li Yu and her husband always seemed keen to stress the positives of their life in Dapu Road, often referring to a newly constructed park immediately to the south of their home recently built as part of the Shanghai Expo urban regeneration scheme, they often made direct comparisons to the quality of life that they experienced in her mother-in-law’s neighbourhood. When such comparisons were made, there was a sense that they deemed their own residential setting to be deficient in some significant ways to the 1980s-built xincun lived in by Li Yu’s mother-in-law, only a 10-minute bicycle ride away and the place at which they have eaten dinner almost every day for the past 30 years. Like those city residents referred to by Read and Chen, albeit more implicitly, Li Yu and her husband implied the ‘coldness and anonymity of neighborly relations in the new apartment complexes’ especially vis-a-vis ‘older neighborhoods they remember, perhaps with a bit of nostalgic imagination’. ⁵² Feelings of nostalgia did not, however, overwhelm Li Yu given that her continued contact with the older xincun enabled her to attain a picture of life there that contained the good and bad. Li Yu talked of how there were people in her mother-in-law’s xincun who inspired strong feelings of animosity: in contrast to the absence of emotion inspired by those she lived amidst in the xiaoqu on Dapu Road.

Whilst movement from the old to the new appeared to be experienced relatively easily, especially for Li Jian if not quite as comfortably for Li Yu, such repositioning appeared less capable of providing those living in older areas with social satisfaction and reassurance. Whilst Li Jian moved between the two areas, he walked into an environment that he was familiar with, there were barriers, both real and imagined, that prevented the ‘new’ from becoming a place conducive to positive feelings for those who did not feel they belonged there. The spaces themselves were unfamiliar, lacking any connection to their own pasts, and there were barriers, security guards and signs stating that these xiaoqu were not for non-residents to enter into, for leisure or dog walking and so on. Such spaces were, then, rather more exclusionary and divisive. For Li Lin and the youngest sibling of the Li family, Li Ya, an even greater sense of fear, foreboding and ambivalence appeared to typify their attempts to attain ontological security. Li Lin still lived within a nongtang built in the 1920s, just a short bicycle ride away from Li Jian’s gated xiaoqu. Whilst walking around the area in which Li Lin, her husband and their 19-year-old daughter live it is easy as a visitor to project feelings of nostalgia onto the place – especially when one is aware that the area is, apparently, on the verge of demolition – reading the streets for signifiers of traditional values and the value-laden notion, at least in a Western context, of community. Like Hewitt, I often feel a ‘nagging sense of loss’: a ‘cold, sinking feeling’, as though ‘watching an old friend dying’ ⁵³ when I come into contact with neighbourhoods such as this, imagining them some years later as a shopping mall or high-rise residential apartment block.

Li Lin and her family, however, found it much more difficult to achieve positive feelings about nongtang life since their own sentiments were connected to bodily experiences, shaped by the practical hardships associated with living there. Unlike her brother or myself for that matter who were able to come and go, she and her family were stuck there living their lives amidst the realization that sooner or later their home will be demolished. In sharp contrast to my own somewhat romantic feelings about the way of life in this lane were comments made by Li Lin and her family. When asked to describe his neighbourhood, Li Lin’s husband’s answer was succinct, immediately puncturing any lingering sense I had that my nostalgic lens toward their neighbourhood could be meaningfully applied. ‘It is vey bad,’ said Li Lin’s husband emphatically. ‘It’s dirty and messy. The environment is really bad.’

Despite feeling dissatisfied with their living environment neither Li Lin nor her husband and daughter unequivocally wished to move out. Admittedly the very tangible shortcomings associated with their day-to-day living in their nongtang mean that when Li Lin and her family talk about the possibility of being relocated, subsequent to the impending demolition of their nongtang, they are often excited. In good humour, they tend to extend tentative invitations to family members to come to eat or stay, hospitality that would be impossible in their existing home. Nonetheless, entwined with this excitement are often somewhat contrary feelings. Although Li Lin and her family spoke in very disparaging terms about the nature of life within their lane, particularly the environment, they were also extremely anxious about what level of compensation they would be given by the government for their property. Furthermore, they were also aware that the location in which they lived carried positive connotations and that this enabled them to attain a certain status by virtue of this, albeit in very basic living conditions. This was especially noticeable when listening to Li Lin’s daughter talk about Luwan district in a wider sense, vis-a-vis neighbouring districts.

When the Shanghai government’s plans for Luwan district to be incorporated into neighbouring Huangpu district became discussed in the local media, Li Lin’s daughter had been most unhappy, posting comments on her Weibo, a Chinese equivalent to Twitter. When I talked with her at the start of September 2011 about why she had felt so unhappy, even angry, her feelings were still clearly very raw. ‘I felt bad because I am a Luwan person,’ she said, ‘Huangpu people are idiots.’ After calming down somewhat, she elaborated upon the nature of her feelings:

Before, we had Luwan Middle School, Luwan Primary School and so on but now they don’t mean anything. It is as if you suddenly find out that China doesn’t exist and has come to be called something else, like under a foreign country’s name. Would you feel happy about that? How would you feel if you went back to England and it was called something else?

Li Lin’s daughter felt that being a resident of Luwan was an important facet of not only her feelings about herself but also the way that other people saw her, perceiving Luwan district as a ‘natural area’, a homogeneous self-aware community that was distinct from its neighbour, in this case the district of Huangpu. In common with persons spending time in a country other than their own, it appeared that Li Lin’s daughter’s need to express her own identity was necessitated by change and, specifically, the need to mark distinctions. Such sentiments expressed by Li Lin’s daughter echo Cohen’s claim that ‘the greater the pressure on communities to modify their structural forms to comply with those elsewhere, the more they are inclined to reassert their boundaries symbolically . . . . In other words, as the structural bases of boundary become blurred, so the symbolic bases are strengthened through “flourishes and decorations”, “aesthetic frills” and so forth’, ⁵⁴ many of which – in colourful language – appeared on her Weibo.

Such a complex intermingling of seemingly contrary states indicate that Li Lin and her family were experiencing considerable ambivalence. Although the term was first used in psychoanalysis to describe a perpetual ‘fluctuation between wanting one thing and wanting its opposite’, ambivalence is also capable of referring to a simultaneous attraction to and repulsion by an object, person or action. ⁵⁵ Whilst such processes of striving for ontological security brought into play a series of oscillating feelings, some positive and some negative, it seemed that as soon as one became entrenched it would ebb, flow and give way to a wholly different, often contrary, palette of emotions. For Li Lin and her family, this more troubling set of feelings emerged when they confronted the contradictions between their own standard of living and those they observed, on the edge of their own neighbourhood, in nearby Xintiandi. Their proximity to such development led them to feel that they were being left behind, cast aside or ignored. ‘We live in the old society,’ said Li Lin’s daughter, ‘but many of the people who live around us are living in the new society.’ Whilst she consciously and ironically utilized revolutionary rhetoric, her father used idiomatic language to indicate that he not only shared these feelings of marginalization, but also felt a sense of abandonment and social exclusion. ‘It is like heaven and earth,’ ⁵⁶ he said, ‘the Communist party has not got time for people like us yet. On one side of the neighbourhood there are posh places like Xintiandi, and on the other side, there is us.’

Whilst Li Lin and her family were experiencing considerable ontological anxiety, it seemed that through semi-conscious, unconscious and even conscious processes of reflection, they ultimately constructed their outlook in such a way as to accentuate the positives of their own living arrangement. On this basis, it was possible for Li Lin to interpret the materially poor environment both inside and outside her domestic space in a positive light by virtue of the fact that she was able to see the shortcomings of living in an area that had better amenities and infrastructure. In short, Li Lin and her family were aware that although their own neighbourhood had its own very tangible shortcomings, a newer type of neighbourhood living arrangement would not be without problems of its own. As Li Lin’s daughter put it:

Our nongtang is, in some ways, better than new neighbourhoods. In the new xiaoqu, doors are always shut and no one knows each other. Although our living condition is not good, we have been living here for a long time, so it’s not too bad. In the news I read about someone in a new xiaoqu who had died for several days yet no one knew about it. But here the neighbours know everything about you, even a tiny little small thing. This kind of thing would never happen where I live.

Within such psychological processes, there is an echo of what has been defined within psychoanalytical literature as splitting. ⁵⁷ Cast in polarized terms, these images constitute one that is devalued and one that is, albeit with tensions, idealized, and this goes in some way to ease those psychic tensions between parts of Li Lin’s daughter’s subjectivity.

Li Ya, her husband and their son live together with her parents within a very cramped space, despite the fact that they have accommodation of their own in the suburban district of Xinzhuang. Whilst the fact that they receive a modest rental income for this property partially accounts for this decision, it seems that they are motivated by other concerns. On one hand, they provide care for her parents, and this is the official explanation for their decision to remain living in Luwan. Li Ya is, however, clearly fearful of the life that she and her family would live out in the suburbs. Like those informants who participated in a study by Willmott and Young, ⁵⁸ Li Ya implied that newly constructed suburban locations were spaces in which it was necessary to maintain social distance and where it was less welcoming to strangers, less friendly and less easy-going than the neighbourhood in Luwan where she lives. She also worried that were they to move there her son would not be able to retain his own residence permit at their relatively centrally located Luwan district address. Thus, whilst perhaps as a wife she might well appreciate the additional domestic space in the suburbs (she and her husband currently sleep within one room that they share with their son), as a mother Li Ya sees the tangible benefits of remaining in more centrally located Luwan district. Li Ya’s ontological security in the public setting of the neighbourhood rested on her ability ‘to be acknowledged as rightfully existing there: to be recognised as belonging’. ⁵⁹

Whilst Li Jian was able to partake in two environments, almost simultaneously, Li Ya was extremely fearful that by moving to the suburbs she would be unable to maintain her relationships with those living in the xincun in Luwan district. Li Ya’s fears about the suburbs only seemed to grow, year after year, as her image of the suburbs became adorned with more and more harrowing information. For Li Ya, the suburb itself and the ways of being therein, lay hidden from view behind a curtain on which were painted terrible pictures, making it resemble that picture of East London to which Charles Booth referred more than a century ago. ⁶⁰ With regard to her belief that residents in the suburbs maintained social distance, Li Ya compared this unfavourably with the proximate relations experienced in her own xincun that she often spoke of by referring to the notion of ‘proper behaviour is based on reciprocity’ (礼尚往来). ⁶¹ For Li Ya, it seemed that the opposite of the type of recognition she received in her residential area in the inner city was not opposed in her mind to the invisibility of the suburbs, but was underscored by a fear that in the suburbs she would not fit.

Of all informants, Li Mei and her husband seemed unequivocally satisfied with their residential lives, and this was perhaps why when the ontological security that they attained from this was threatened by changes in their personal lives they quickly acted. After the birth of their grandson, Li Mei and her husband had gone to stay with their daughter, her husband and their grandson in Hongkou district. It was assumed that they would stay there for at least one year, so as to be able to provide care for their grandson, particularly when their daughter returned to work following her maternity leave. During this time, a nagging sense of loss seemed to permeate Li Mei’s husband’s very visible joy at the arrival of his grandson. He seemed depressed and regularly went to bed immediately after dinner, sometimes as early as eight o’clock. For Li Mei’s husband in particular, being temporarily away from the neighbourhood in which he had lived for the best part of 30 years seemed to conjure up in him a profound sense of anguish.

Despite being downcast, Li Mei and her husband had already taken steps to enhance their own senses of ontological security. Li Mei’s husband began extensive renovations to his home, ensuring that it would be capable of housing them – the baby included – rather than necessitating that they move to Hongkou, and, in the process, further embedding their own roots in their own xincun. Whilst also providing additional space for their grandson, the key enhancement was additional space in which to have guests, largely achieved by reducing the bedroom size and increasing the size of the kitchen/eating space. In one renovation, Li Mei’s husband had transformed his home from one that was a space to live, though they did entertain regularly before this, into one that was vastly more capable of acting as a social space. Li Mei’s husband was, in effect, symbolically putting down social markers and, significantly, ‘using the symbolic vocabulary’ that he felt most comfortable with, thereby creating community. ⁶² Specifically, Li Mei’s husband was constructing a space in which he could use social markers of food and drink whilst performing the role of the thoughtful, attentive and jovial host, both of which he was not only comfortable with but also socially proficient in. By such renovations he had in effect created in one space what others, such as Li Jian, could only achieve through a combination of both, and in so doing he had found a way to bridge the social and familial aspects of his subjectivity. It was also a statement to inform, tacitly at least, his daughter and perhaps rather more so his son-in-law that he would not move, at least for the time being, and that he fully intended to enjoy these halcyon days of early retirement. Whilst the implementation of this way of life of entertaining that he envisaged ran into temporary opposition, being delayed in the process, by his daughter’s fears about how the newly painted apartment might affect her infant’s lungs, by the spring of 2012, Li Mei and her husband were spending less and less time in Hongkou and their care for their grandchild was primarily taking place within their own home, in the xincun.

Zhou Xiaoyun, a Shanghainese woman in her mid-30s, had residential experiences that were rife with existential anxieties. In 2011, she moved back into the area that she had grown up in after many years away, having studied elsewhere in Shanghai before spending time overseas and later living in another city in China. Though she had moved back into the area in which she was born and where many members of her extended family still live, something that she had not only aspired to do for some time but also something that she probably assumed would generate ontological security, her status as a tenant rather than a homeowner was a significant source of worry, discomfort, anxiety and insecurity. She was fed up of feeling perpetually temporary. As well as expressing feelings of futility and pointlessness, and discussing the practical inconvenience associated with moving from home to home, she focused on how homeownership was a social marker that should as a matter of course have been attained at this stage in her life course. ‘I should have a home,’ she complained, ‘I’m almost 40.’ Such feelings of anxiety were only exacerbated when in early 2012 her daughter was born. At this time, she was full of fluctuating moods that though largely connected to her acquired new status of motherhood and the responsibilities and pressure that this entailed her emotional state was impacted on by her residential situation. She would cry and say that she and her husband had been irresponsible bringing a child into the world without having a fixed base. Such feelings refused to dissipate, and she argued regularly with her husband, something she and her husband had insisted they would not do after the birth of their child, and this negative interdependence between them only escalated when those previously discussed conflicts with the neighbour downstairs intensified. ‘We have nowhere to go. We are homeless,’ she said. The arguments between her and her husband often stemmed from her belief that her husband was indecisive and she blamed him for not having bought a property previously. He in turn blamed her for what he believed was her inability to share responsibility for the reality of their situation and for failing to accept that homeownership was beyond them financially in any event and that a degree of compromise was needed. Often Zhou could be seen gazing through the windows of the various estate agents in the area or taking name cards from various agency employees on the street outside the commercial housing complex with their black-and-white boards.

She said that she felt desperate, and could not envisage any way to resolve the issue. In the past, she had been able to paper over – literally in some cases – some of the underlying ontological insecurity by making visits to places such as IKEA and not only buying products but also installing them, and making minor home renovations such as creating additional shelving. Now she could not be bothered. ‘I’m tired of making, taking down, and making home again,’ she said. As it happened, part of her ontological insecurity was removed when her extended family discovered that she could be placed on a waiting list for a property that could be purchased at a preferable rate – by virtue of her parents being Shanghai hukou holders yet not owning property and living in another city. Though the result is as yet uncertain, given that she is on a waiting list and, even if successful, will be located faraway from the area she thinks of as home, it was clear that by the early summer she had begun to overcome some of the anxiety that had overwhelmed her during the spring. Whilst this was partly due to her increasing proficiency and confidence in her role as a mother, it was clear that her residential status contributed to these feelings too. Essentially, as well as having the possibility of being able to own her own home, she had started to make home in the apartment that she had rented, albeit temporarily: coat hooks were hung and a seemingly sophisticated system of domestic arrangements was put in place to complement, and fully make use of, the layout of this new apartment. From the perspective of her landlord, her attempts to ‘make home’ within a rented space seemed absurd, unable as he was to see how this was, in part, connected to desires for security. ‘You are only going to be here for one year,’ he told her, ‘it’s my home and if I had known that you would want to move out my furniture and change so much I would have rented the apartment to someone else.’ Such comments which would, only one month ago, have sent her yet deeper into her existential anxiety were, by now, unable to hurt her: they were like water off a duck’s back. ‘I like it here,’ she told me several weeks after having moved in, before going on to say, ‘It is the best place that I have lived in. I feel at home here.’ Even now, it seemed that what now was capable of providing ontological security would, in due course, become the very thing that would later contribute to ontological anxiety and insecurity.

In summary, it is hoped that the preceding paragraphs have shown the ways in which residents move between locations, both physically and psychologically, drawing information from a variety of sources as they seek to make sense of their own residential lives. It is clear that residential areas, whether old or new, are complex entities engendering a great deal more ambivalence in their occupants than is capable of being communicated by a language of then and now, old and new, and low-rise and high-rise. Residents’ identifications do not emerge in response only to physical locations but instead emerge by virtue of real engagements with people and places intermingling with rather more imagined encounters with ideas and discursive constructs.

Welcoming the change

Some changes in this area affected informants relatively positively, providing social satisfaction. Such was the case with many of the results of gentrification and globalization. Although elder informants did not particularly frequent such new places as coffee shops, restaurants and fitness centres, feeling not only that the products and services there were a waste of money but also that a degree of cultural capital that they did not possess was necessary to go there, they nonetheless appreciated the aesthetics and atmosphere, feeling that they reinforced the neighbourhood’s ‘creative cultural distinction’, ⁶³ making it discernibly more ‘superior’ and, by virtue of this, less of a xiazhijiao.

These changes not only translated into increased property prices, a factor that though exasperating to tenants such as Zhou Xiaoyun was certainly pleasing to homeowners even if they had no intention or desire to sell. Changes in the area also acted as a source of pride and a basis upon which face could be attained. A recently constructed park at the end of her road, built as part of massive renovation accompanying the Shanghai Expo, was something to which Li Yu regularly referred. When she spoke, especially to family members who often went to the park during weekends, she appeared to feel a sense of ownership, believing in some way that when her relatives visited the park, they were in some sense coming into her space. The changes occurring in the vicinity of her home also made her feel proud and this acted as a platform upon which she could feel confident enough to begin comparing her residential setting with those lived in by others, notably the vastly more wealthy parents of her son-in-law. She appeared upset then, when in a discussion with them in which they had praised her area, but not on this basis but because it provided more convenient ways to buy routine low-end products such as instant noodles, something that they – as an indirect boast perhaps – sometimes struggled to do within their vastly more expensive, prestigious and international residential location close to Hengshan Road, widely recognized to be one of the city’s ‘hot spots’.

Younger informants, despite typically having very low disposable incomes, frequently gravitated toward these gentrified spaces. Liu Qiang, for example, regularly went either to a local branch of Starbucks or the small, locally run yet no less international in feel, coffee shops within the Taikang Road complex. The spaces he tended to visit are what Hannigan calls ‘urban entertainment destinations’ or ‘urban entertainment centres’ ⁶⁴ and had the capacity to vastly alter his feelings toward not only his domestic but also neighbourhood life. Such spaces provided him with an environment which not only ignored ‘the reality of homelessness, unemployment, social injustice and crime’ ⁶⁵ but also replaced the ‘disorganized reality of older streets and cities’ and that of his immediate environs with ‘a measured, controlled and organized kind of urban experience which is intimately linked to a fusion of consumerism, entertainment and popular culture’. ⁶⁶ Such an environment was intelligible to him, outside the parental gaze, and, significantly, empowering and enabling him, albeit temporarily, to partake in the kind of cosmopolitan lifestyle that he aspired to and identified with, despite living down the road, in a 1980s-built xincun in a small domestic space that he shares with not only his parents but also his elderly grandparents. Though to some, these spaces might seem noisy and hectic, for Liu Qiang this was the type of commotion he liked rather more so than the incessant noise and constant interruptions at home. Here he could, temporarily, be someone else. Liu Qiang’s view of the world from inside Starbucks is vastly different from that which he can attain from the window of the apartment in which he lives, in close proximity to parents and grandparents, being also subject to regular visits from family members and neighbours. From inside Starbucks, his view of the city bears some parallels to the evocative view of Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Centre, described by de Certeau ⁶⁷ in the sense that from here ‘brutal oppositions of race and styles’ and other conflicting elements are transformed into ‘a texturology in which extremes coincide’. When Liu Qiang, like those tourists described by Urry who often gaze from the windows of a train, ⁶⁸ looks outward from the window of a café, he feels protected somehow: he is ‘lifted out of the city’s grasp’ with the result that ‘the bewitching world by which one was “possessed”’ is transformed ‘into a text that lies before one’s eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a Solar Eye, looking down like a God.’ ⁶⁹

Whilst such spaces were, for the most part, welcomed, this should not be taken to imply that these spaces and the types of meaning they connote entered into the area without resistance, like a hypodermic needle impacting on the hearts, minds, bodies and souls of residents. There was, in short, a great deal of negotiation. As previously noted, elder residents typically eschewed these spaces, continuing their lives within the more established, and unchanged, majiang rooms, bathhouses and karaoke halls or, quite often, having a rather more home-based approach to leisure, even when living in relatively small apartments. Perhaps as a consequence of this eschewal to go to or buy from these new spaces, quite often shops opened, only to close down shortly afterwards, with much money being spent on repetitive cycles of renovation and decoration. On Liyuan Road, for example, within barely six months, a premise opened as an Australian restaurant and bar, before becoming a Thai restaurant, then a more coffee-oriented establishment later emerging as a space that seems primarily to serve boxes of packed food for a clientele of young white-collar workers looking for a cheap, quick local meal at lunchtime, many of whom work at one or other of the by now many advertising and creative centres that have, also as part of these gentrification processes, entered the area. As this final example illustrates, in many instances products and services entering the area become localized. In this small area, there are interesting ways in which the global and gentrified intersect with the local in physical locations. In Family Mart, for example, street cleaners gather to chat during their breaks, with their street cleaning equipment left at the door or placed, somewhat precariously, on the edges of tables. Meanwhile, albeit a tube ride away, in IKEA, where Zhou Xiaoyun goes to try to gain a scrap of ontological security – see previous part of this article – there are middle-aged and retired men and women using the dining facilities as a place in which to gather, and date, and when the company’s management try to curtail this they react, sometimes aggressively. ⁷⁰

Such cycles of negotiation and maturation become manifest as ‘tactics’ as local residents find ways to occupy those spaces that have emerged as a consequence of gentrification, whilst using them in ways that were not intended by urban planners. Such negotiation seems to be encapsulated under the multi-lane neon-lit elevated roadway that runs through the heart of the city, linking Puxi (west of the river) and Pudong (east of the river), transporting cars that often travel at breakneck speeds. During the evenings, just outside a newly constructed subway station entrance, local residents, mostly middle-aged and elderly, gather to dance to music emanating from a portable stereo. At night, the presence of dancers within the shadow of such a blue neon-lit structure makes for a spectacular scene, especially when combined with the noise of music and passers-by. Such a scene, seemingly in an instant, unsettles the types of association given to the new and old, where the new – often summed up in shorthand by such urban features as elevated neon-lighted roadways and often shown as speeded up in various documentaries ⁷¹ – is seen as annihilating forms of locality, and provides a way of thinking about community that does not see people as hapless victims. Such practices can be explained with reference to de Certeau’s language of ‘tactics’. He distinguishes between the strategies of the strong and ‘the art of the weak’. ⁷² In making such an analogy, it is, however essential not to romanticize resistance. ⁷³ Several years ago on Luban Road, for example, in the space where dancing now takes place, residents placed banners, objecting to the demolition of their homes that were torn down to make way for the now established Luban Road metro station. To compare dancing with the subsequently futile act of resistance through the posting of banners seems a faulty analogy. Essentially, I wish to suggest that outside the homes of residents, in public spaces – such as in the park toward the north of Mengzi Road – which have been carved out from the debris of demolition within the area, new forms of relatedness, engagement and neighbourliness play out. Primary roles such as mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, son or daughter are emphasized as a means of overcoming or eliding other forms of social identity or disparity such as those based on class, income and home location. And this appears to be a platform upon which residents perform.

Conclusions

Whilst this article has repeatedly used the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ – shorthand for a variety of other binary oppositions – it has been suggested that they be seen less as terms of distinction, but rather as what Cohen refers to as a ‘complementary opposition’. ⁷⁴ Specifically, this article has argued that profound transformations in various aspects of urban life have not led to an irreversible end to, or even decline in, community. Residential experiences are still a major contributing factor toward feelings of comfort and well-being in the world, having the capacity to erode even generally recognized positive experiences associated with meaningful life experiences such as entering parenthood or grandparenthood. Neighbourhoods, in short, refer to much more than simply material space, being capable of contributing, in positive and negative ways, to those conditions of possibility in which ontological security is derived or lost. This article has, then, sought to present ‘the survival, the burgeoning, the assertion of community, not as an aberration to be explained, but as a normal, expectable expression of the resilience of culture: of people’s sense of self’. ⁷⁵

With regard to those people living within these spaces, this article has hoped to show the ways in which people seek to put together information and, by virtue of this, to achieve comfort or ‘ontological moorings’ ⁷⁶ and it seems that these are successful when there are elements that can, albeit in shorthand, be encapsulated by the terms the ‘old’ and the ‘new’. Within such a milieu, at the intersections of the ‘old’ and ‘new’, residents are able to get a sense of their own past, present and imagined future. As Charles Taylor puts it, in ‘order to have a sense of who we are, we have to have a notion of how we have become, and of where we are going’. ⁷⁷

At the moment, in this area within Shanghai’s Luwan district, there are a whole set of complementary oppositions: ‘symbols from different worlds overlap’: the sound of the pat-pat of the basketball – seemingly from morning to night – in the small court at the corner of Liyuan Park; jazz from the Vietnamese restaurant; the Chinese National Anthem playing on speakers during the early morning in the primary school on Jumen Road, yet seeping into the streets beyond; the clunking of majiang tiles emanating sporadically from various locations within the xincun that stretches between Mengzi Road and Jumen Road; arguments, and then laughter, coming from those gathered above and around the Chinese chess table on the pavement of Mengzi Road; 1980s European pop music from Family Mart and Coffee Bean combine with the sight of middle-aged women doing morning exercises on the junction of Jumen Road and Quxi Road outside a 7-Eleven convenience store; middle-aged and elderly men and women dancing in Liyuan Park, across from the entrance to Starbucks; and foreign faces which then mingle yet further with the smells of ‘stinky tofu’, fresh coffee and intestines. And, as Hannah Davis observes in her description of life in a small Moroccan agricultural town of 50,000 people, ‘it is not the contrast between the elements that is striking; it is the lack of contrast’ ⁷⁸ and the ways these symbols are integrated in a taken-for-granted manner, contributing in different ways to a complex syncopation of sounds and images. And, as a visiting relative who had never before left Europe put it, ‘it just seems so normal’.

This is why this area provides for such a rich case study, when change is going on all round it, to the north, south, east and west. There is undoubtedly a danger that change brings in the new to such an extent that the old is displaced, but in making such a statement I am aware that the fears I feel might be more a result of discourse than anything real: and that, in any event, new forms of community will inevitably emerge. I am also aware that by romanticizing these forms, even now when concluding this article, I am not only failing to listen to the voices of informants such as Li Lin but also perpetuating the discourse – that no matter how hard I try seems to maintain some hold over me – that sees community as in decline. I am, in short, tending toward a sentimentalization of neighbourhood. ⁷⁹

Nonetheless, and even acknowledging these issues, the vitality of this area rests upon its having both the old and new, rather than either or. This is as important for me as a short-term resident as it is for longer-term residents such as Li Jian, even if the new is not necessarily indicative of a set of practices that are used. Although an ethnographic approach such as this seems to raise as many questions as answers, particularly by its identification of those hugely subjective factors that influence perceptions, it is hoped that this article can partake in dialogues with other methodologies and disciplines so as ultimately to ‘link academic research with social policy’. ⁸⁰ This article does, then, include a warning to local and central government planners engaged in processes of demolition and renovation to recognize that these ‘redevelopment zones’ represent complex, intergenerational networks that cannot easily be re-created, a sentiment that has been shared by urban researchers from Willmott and Young ⁸¹ to Jane Jacobs and Herbert Gans. The realities of urban residential areas demand that observers not only accept and tolerate but also embrace ambiguity, for only in so doing is there the possibility that meaningful solutions can emerge.